Timocracy
/taɪˈmɒkrəsi/noun
A state in which political rights depend on property, or in Plato's use, one governed by the love of honour.
The Greek roots
Literally: “rule by honour, or by property value”
The story of the word
The double sense comes straight from timē, which meant both honour and price. Aristotle used the word for a constitution with a property qualification; Plato used it in the Republic for the stage between aristocracy and oligarchy, a warrior state run on ambition, with Sparta as the model. Solon's Athens was timocratic in the property sense, sorting citizens by how much grain their land produced.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Voting rights tied to a freehold made the early republic a timocracy in practice.
Plato's timocratic man is brave, competitive and slightly deaf to argument.